The painted lanes
Houses in yellow, blue and red.
pjt56 — CC BY 3.0 · Västgöten — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Bougnatophile — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Rauma Tourist Office — CC BY-SA 3.0
Seven, fewer than a visitor expects but varied. **Old Rauma** here. The sea fortress of **Suomenlinna** on islands off Helsinki — the best known and easiest, a twenty-minute ferry. The old wooden **Petäjävesi Church**. The **Verla** mill, a preserved industrial site for board and paper. The Bronze Age **Sammallahdenmäki** burial cairns. The **Struve Geodetic Arc**, a chain of survey points across ten countries. And the **Kvarken Archipelago**, whose land has been rising a few millimetres a year out of the sea since the ice age.
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Old Rauma is on the World Heritage list, and is **the largest preserved historic wooden town in the Nordic countries**: about six hundred timber buildings across twenty-eight hectares, and people still live in them. That is the important difference: Rauma is not an open-air museum or a quarter restored for visitors but **a working residential district** of about eight hundred people. You walk narrow lanes between houses painted yellow, blue and red, with carved doors, small windows and back gardens, and their owners are inside. The town received its charter in 1442, burned twice, and most of the present buildings date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What preserved it is that Rauma stayed poor and remote, so the old was never demolished to build the new. It was historically known for **bobbin lace**, and holds an annual festival for it. **About 130 km from Tampere, an hour and a half by car.** Walking the town is free; the small museums are ticketed.
Houses in yellow, blue and red.
Rauma's historic craft, with an annual festival.
Vanha Rauma, Rauma